The one who asked about the liquor store was tall, thin-faced. The one from the back seat, Erzhan’s attacker, “looked like heavyweight boxer.”
“And the driver?” Arthur asked.
“He not ever see.”
He came to fifteen hours later, naked, groggy, in a police van, just as it was rolling into Prison 303 under a raised steel gate.
“What day was this?” Arthur asked.
Bejko rummaged in a drawer for an old desk calendar. “I am release November thirty. So three days before, on twenty-seven.”
Arthur and DiPalma exchanged looks. That was the same day, Ottawa time, that an IED demolished the Bhashie limousine.
“When come home from Prison 303, I learn more from BBC news. Abzal, he is, how you say, inconvenient person because of bombing in Ottawa City. But is also famous former assassin. All confusing to me. But he not do bombing, not possible.”
“Tell us about this warden,” said DiPalma, who was chain-smoking. He’d warmed to the brandy by now, was on another refill.
“Hard bargainer. Hundred thousand leks to commuting my sentence, not take less. Hasran Chocoli, good communist in past life, but repent, kept job.” Bejko studied Arthur’s tailored dark suit, as if appraising its value. “Chocoli and me, we have mutual respect. Maybe I make contact for you. For token introducer fee.”
“That would be very kind.”
“Five thousand dollar is usual fee. For you, three thousand.”
Arthur swallowed, but decided not to quibble, drew out his traveller’s cheques.
“Chocoli is not so cheap, I must warn. He prefer leks, but maybe also take euros, dollars. Not traveller’s cheques, too easy to trace.”
Though a taxi had been hired for the morning, for the journey to Korca and the date with warden Hasran Chocoli, Arthur couldn’t locate DiPalma. No one from the Gjirokaster Hotel had seen him leave. Everything was in order in his room, clothes hung, the washroom giving evidence he’d showered and shaved. His cellphone was still there.
After cancelling the taxi, Arthur scoured the neighbourhood in the hope, proven vain, that he might find him in a restaurant or bar or maybe a drugstore, seeking a remedy for his hangover.
I’m planning to meet Ledjina’s parents tomorrow. But where were they to be found? The manager at her restaurant was unfriendly, claiming not to know her address or phone number, let alone those of her parents. She wasn’t expected on duty until the dinner hour.
Arthur spent the afternoon seething — while either pacing or studying his phrasebook, trying to focus on the perplexing Albanian consonants. In a restless fury, he snapped the book shut and turned on his set to CNN. He was besieged by rolling shots of Christmas celebrations around the world. Bizarrely, depressingly, he was suddenly aware he was alone for Christmas in a strange land.
The newscast went to the day’s headline story, a startling event: a Canadian raid last night on Igorgrad. CF-18s had taken out Bhashyistan’s ground-to-air defences and blown up hangars holding several MiG interceptors. The Information Ministry had been razed flat. A missile had made shards of a yellow Hummer whose occupant was believed to be the infamous third son, the late Mukhamet Khan Ivanovich.
On screen now, trying not to smile, was a colonel from Canadian Forces Air Command, describing a “perfectly executed, surgical procedure with limited targets.” All aircraft and personnel had returned safely to the U.S. base in Kyrgyzstan.
Arthur felt no joy in anyone’s death, even Mukhamet’s, but the man had authored his own downfall, courting disaster with his taunts.
Here, in clips from a press conference in Ottawa, was Clara Gracey, confident and commanding, praising the military, proclaiming that Canada would not be mocked by a tinpot dictator, instructing the Ultimate Leader to release the hostages to avoid further strikes, castigating UN members for their empty phrases of support, and announcing that Canada would single-handedly do what international justice demanded.
A reporter asked if she feared fallout because the raid was on Christmas Eve. “Certainly not. We’re dealing with a country that denies Christians the right of free worship and perverts the true meaning of the great religion of Islam. The entire free world applauds what we have done.”
A political tour de force. The prime minister could yet raise her party from the grave. She had embarked on a clever campaign, not against the official opposition but against a country far, far away.
Meanwhile, with exemplary bravado, Bhashyistan national radio was telling a different story: patriotic defenders had beaten off yet another invasion by the Western warmongers. A lie so pitiful that even in Muslim Albania it was likely to provoke only laughter.
It was three o’clock. His anger at DiPalma was being succeeded by concern for him.
25
For Charley Thiessen, this didn’t seem a lot like Christmas. Yet everything was in place for it: the house festooned with decorations, the glowing angel reigning over a spruce dressed with sparkly icicles, carols pumping from the stereo, the rich greasy smell of a twenty-pound bird in the oven, Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Earl hunkered over the thousand-piece jigsaw that was a holiday tradition. Mom and wife in the kitchen, jabbering nonstop. The two boys trying out their new toboggan by the riverbank. The entire town of Flesherton prettily coated with five inches of newly fallen snow.
His mother had been constantly at him: “You going to sit there all day like a lump? What’s eating you, anyway, Snarly Charley? It’s a time of joy, for Christ’s sake.” His wife would chime in: “You with us or against us, Charley? Get off that stupid computer.”
He’d been all day on his laptop, hiding behind the massive, blinking tree, surfing the news outlets for headlines he didn’t want to see. Like, for instance: “Justice Minister’s Smear Backfires.” His head was aching and his insides were boiling from the stress accumulated over the last few days, ever since that gut-clenching horror show when he’d raced back to the Chateau to try to rescue the mini-recorder.
Scenes from that foiled mission kept replaying. Calling Stonewell’s suite from a house phone, leaving an inane message: “Guess you guys must’ve split, I’ll keep trying.” Then, taking no chances, racing up there. A moment of hope when he saw the “Do Not Disturb” — surely it meant they were sleeping it off. Rapping on the door, calling, “Yo, Robert, it’s me.” Shouting, hammering in vain as a housekeeper stared at him from down the hall. Returning to the elevator, feeling defeated.
Also bugging Charley was that his oldest, Joy, just turned eighteen, had come back from college for the holidays like the green avenger, carrying on about vanishing bears, whales, fish, forests, and coral reefs. She was doing a paper on greenhouse gas emissions. She’d forced him to watch a Suzuki documentary predicting scenarios he didn’t need to hear about, coastal flooding, drowning cities. He had his own problems.
Uncle Earl passed by to refuel before attacking the jigsaw again. “Get you another toddy, Charley boy?”
Thiessen smiled wanly, nodded — another toddy would not hurt.
“Why so glum? We blasted the bejesus out of those Bhashies, best Christmas present the country’s ever had.”
“I’ll bet it was your idea, Charley.” His mom, joining in, wiping her hands on her apron. “Don’t tell me. Cabinet secrecy. I may be just your dumb mother, but I know how things work.” Then going after him again: “Such a perfect Christmas Day. Get in the spirit, Mr. Prime Minister.”
Mr. Prime Minister. The concept was strange to him now, illusory. Maybe he’d been fooling himself thinking he was P.M. material, maybe DuWallup and the gnome had been having a private joke, encouraging the cabinet buffoon to think he was the party’s prince-in-waiting. Maybe they thought he could be used, the way George W. Bush was.